Saturday, December 19, 2015

The agreement reached in Paris will only be meaningful if countries make progress on their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Lack of progress is often attributed to the influence of climate skepticism, and some observers expect a new wave of skeptical voices in the coming years. Yesterday Michael Oppenheimer was quoted in the Washington Post, saying

“Denialism draws its oxygen from larger political agendas and Paris won’t put an end to those... There will still be plenty of opposition to regulating greenhouse gas emissions, to regulation in general, and to any sort of international cooperation.”

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

All have an opinion on the result of COP21, even if these opinions may be based on rather different perceptions of the results. But we thought that it could be interesting if we Kimazwieblists would present some individual views. Four of us, Reiner Grundmann, Werner Krauss, Hans von Storch and Eduardo Zorita, have taken on the challenge - here are their views (in alphabetical order):

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Compared to Copenhagen, the new deal reached today in Paris is a surprising success. It is a success in that parties to the conference have agreed on a document that represents a compromise on several issues that have proved contentious among different countries, and among different social groups within each nation.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Last week the North of the UK was hit by strong rain (storm ‘Desmond’) which led to massive flooding of various towns and villages, especially in Cumbria. As is routine in such cases, the question is asked if this has been caused by climate change. The Met office issued this statement by Professor Dame Julia Slingo, Met Office Chief Scientist:

“It’s too early to say definitively whether climate change has made a contribution to the exceptional rainfall. We anticipated a wet, stormy start to winter in our three-month outlooks, associated with the strong El Niño and other factors.
“However, just as with the stormy winter of two years ago, all the evidence from fundamental physics, and our understanding of our weather systems, suggests there may be a link between climate change and record-breaking winter rainfall. Last month, we published a paper showing that for the same weather pattern, an extended period of extreme UK winter rainfall is now seven times more likely than in a world without human emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Friday, November 27, 2015

27. November 2015 - The Media Watch Blog, of Professor Michael Brüggemann and coworkers, will start operations on 29 November 2015.

They explain: "In our Media Watch Blog we present an analytical view of the media coverage and public debates concerned with the UN-Climate Change Conference in Paris(November 30th – December 11th 2015) through the lens of academic observers from social and climate sciences. We focus on the coverage of the conference in leading media outlets in 40 countries around the globe but we will also provide some first-hand observations from students and researchers who participate in the conference. The blog is hosted by the team of Prof. Brüggemann at the University of Hamburg, but its authors are climate researchers and social scientists from a range of different backgrounds united by an interest in the interdisciplinary study of climate change."

The piece is worth a read, for the cultural history of the role of weather and climate, but also as a demonstration of the impressive self-confidence of some in the anglo-saxon speaking world. We need to lead.

Friday, November 13, 2015

In recent days some confusion (see here and here) seems to have arisen about the nature of the proposed agreement to be reached in Paris (a good summary of arguments can be found over at Carbonbrief). One feature is that it will be determined by national pledges for future GHG reductions, but that it should be binding in some ways, too. When it comes to find words to describe the nature of the agreement, 'treaty' seems to be problematic, as it entails different meanings in different places. US foreign secretary Kerry said that the Paris summit will not lead to a treaty (which is binding to the signatories).

Sunday, November 8, 2015

On 16 November I have been invited to participate at a panel discussion about the past and future IPCC. The panelists have been asked for an initial statement. So far I am thinking of concluding my statement with this:

"• IPCC
is an indispensable effort.

• IPCC
processes need to be improved.
- Mechanism to
deal with claims about errors and conflicts of interest. - Consideration
that “payment” may take the form of societal or professional recognition, not
only in terms of money- Documentation
and
highlighting of contested areas
and
areas of significant lack of scientific analysis-
Mechanisms to prevent
formation of networks of lead authors.- Factoring
into the assessment that scientifically constructed knowledge may be conditioned by culturally constructed (value-based) knowledge claims.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

On 3 November 2015, the European Congress for Science Journalists took place in Budapest, in the impressive building of the Hungarian Academy of Science. One session was on climate change, and I was invited to speak about my own experiences when meeting the press. This was a nice challenge, and forced me to think a bit more about this issue.

Monday, October 26, 2015

On 22 October 2015 the EU Directorate-General for Research and Innovation organized a "Seminar on feedback into policy-making" in Brussels for employees of the EU commission interested in science and its interaction with policy-making. It had been noticed that the EU-demand for "stakeholder-interaction", which is ubiquituous in recent EU projects, is not really seriously implemented by many but in many cases a mere lip-service.

For gaining a better understanding of the problem, the options and pitfalls, a series of seminar was organized, with the one on 22 October being the latest. Unfortunately, Ottmar Edenhofer had to cancel his participation on shortest notice because of sickness, but his transparencies were shown and briefly discussed.

•Climate change is a „constructed“ issue.•Different constructions interact and compete.•One class of constructions is scientific.•Another class of constructions is cultural, in particular maintained and transformed by the media and the Zeitgeist.•Climate science operates in a post-normal situation, which goes along with politicizing science, and scientizing politics.•Public opinion and scientific understanding do not converge.•Climate science needs to reflect upon its role and function.•Precise language should be used, no more “the science is settled”, no cavalier usage of the term “predictions”, when “projections” are meant.•Climate Science needs to offer “Climate Service”, which includes the establishment of a dialogue with the public (direct or via media) and stakeholders –recognizing the socio-cultural dynamics of the issue.•Climate service must take into account competing alternative knowledge claims.•Climate Service should adhere to the principle of sustainability – building trust by avoiding overselling and being explicit in spelling out contested issues.•Climate Service is more than providing data to mostly anonymous clients; direct interaction is in many cases needed.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Many of us have heard the argument that non-democratic countries, China above all, have a far greater potential of addressing urgent tasks of climate policy and of implementing drastic measures. In terms of achieving targets, hierarchies seem to be better equipped than democracies. This is so because in democratic settings many points of resistance can be mobilised. Authoritarian forms of government, by contrast, eliminate such veto points. In a recent paper in Nature, Nico Stehr argues that some commentators have wrongly hinted at such a narrative of superior goal attainment of non-democratic societies, and he emphatically objects to it.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

In a forthcoming publication for the journal Solutions Aseem Prakash and Nives Dolšak from University of Washington (Seattle) make a case for climate change adaptation.

They recognize the need for climate change mitigation but argue that

mitigation-based approaches have run into serious political problems. Furthermore, it is not clear how countries such as China and India are going to enforce mitigation targets domestically even if they were to be persuaded to sign on to mandatory emission reductions. As the vast literature on international treaties produced by political scientists suggest, compliance with these agreements tends to be patchy.

Instead of investing political capital predominantly towards mitigation, we suggest re-orienting the policy focus and paying serious attention to adaptation to climate change. The reality is that the climate is changing and will continue to do so– even if all countries would magically come together and agree on aggressive mitigation targets.

The political opposition to mitigation lies in the fact that mitigation imposes costs on the U.S. fossil fuel and energy intensive sectors while providing benefits that may occur in the long run to a large number of unspecified people anywhere on the globe. Not surprisingly, policy “losers” oppose mitigation policies. Furthermore, the backlash against mitigation might be attributed to the rising economic and political salience of China, the perception that American jobs are being shipped overseas, and that China continues to build coal fired electricity plants while Americans are asked to cut down on emissions. For the West Virginia miner, mitigation implies s/he will lose the major source of her/his livelihood in order to subsidize affluent Chinese or Indian consumers. It is difficult to explain to this miner who is facing economic stress that equity considerations demand that we look at cumulative instead of current emissions.

States, regions and communities that take adaptation seriously would collect taxes for building adaptation measures. These will create the awareness and the motivation for citizens to address the problem of mitigation.

In contrast to mitigation, the political logic of adaptation is compelling. While successful mitigation requires global collective action, adaptation can be successful even when undertaken unilaterally. Importantly, adaptation-related investments create local benefits, not global public goods. Thus, adaptation does not suffer from the free rider problem: those paying for it will also benefit from it. It is difficult to offer the “China excuse” for ignoring adaptation.

By creating local benefits, adaptation creates local constituencies that favor investments in climate change policies. Not only does adaptation deprive politicians of the “China excuse,” it creates new political coalitions to promote pro-environmental policies. As adaptation gathers steam, various groups will begin to recognize the costs of ignoring global climate change. Instead of crowding out mitigation, in the long term, adaptation may create the political support for aggressive mitigation policies.

I think it is high time to make the case for adaptation, yet again. It has been made many times before but not much more than lip service has been paid. Public discourse in the run up to the Paris summit is all about mitigation.

The above paper comes from two political scientists in the USA who have no been at the forefront of climate activism. All the more important to pay attention to their argument. Read their short but powerful article and feel free to comment.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

byHans von Storch

On 22-23 June 2015 the Symposium Circling the Square was organized at the University of Nottingham. I was asked to comment on my view of the role of science in society.Hier is my short statement in English, and further down a German translation prepared by Jörg Kampmann. Both text are available ofacademia.edu, the original English one as audio.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Last week I attended a conference at the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Organized by the German
research council DFG academics from various disciplines gathered for three days
at the Climate Engineering Research Symposium in the old but nicely refurbished
building at the Gendarmenmarkt. The arches and pillars on the right side of the conference
room still show the bullet holes from the last war. The hanging glass ceiling floats
perfectly above the heads of the audience, with ever so tiny spaces between the
panels, illuminated from above. This example of (low-tech) engineering and
craftsmanship could be seen as a symbol of the floating fleet of aircraft deployed
to inject particles into the stratosphere to cool the planet.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Back in 1995, while researching for my book Transnational Environmental Policy, I interviewed Bob Watson who was at the time Associate Director for Environment in the Office of the President of the United States in the White House. I am grateful to him for granting permission to publish the whole transcript of the interview (I had only used small parts in my book. The German version can be found here).

Friday, May 29, 2015

Here another report about an emerging climate change landscape, this time provided by natural sciences. Hans von Storch presents in an Interview with the Flensburger Tageblatt the BACC-II-Report (Second Assessment of Climate Change for the Baltic Sea Basin). In a nutshell, this newspaper report based on an interview with Hans von Storch serves well to mark the contrast between a natural science and a geographic-ethnographic approach as presented in the previous post by Martin Mahoney.

Localizing climate change means more than downscaling regional climate change from global climate models; it means figuring out how climate change becomes part and parcel of the landscapes we actually inhabit. How do people shape their environment in permanently changing atmospheric conditions? Recently, my British colleagues Martin Mahony and Helen Pallett joined us on a trip to my favorite field-site, the Hamburger Hallig. On their excellent blog 'The Topograph', Martin wrote a nice piece about this excursion; his fieldnotes illustrate the dynamics of this emerging energy landscape, with climate change as the most recent episode in a long history of interactions between people and their extreme environment. While in Paris once more the future of the planet will be at stake, in Northern Friesland we can already identify some of the culturally specific ways how people actually deal with the challenge of a changing climate. Enjoy reading a geographer's take on the Wadden Sea landscape!

Monday, May 18, 2015

On March 10 The
Guardian dedicated its Letters to the editor page nearly entirely to
comments from readers about climate change. These were triggered by the paper’s
divestment campaign and addressed various issues related to options for practical
action about climate change, be they individual or on the level of public policy.

Monday, May 4, 2015

I have a new pre-publication paper which you can download here. It examines the changing use and meaning of the term ‘skeptic’ in the US elite press. Based on an analysis of the New York Times it appears that the meaning of the word skeptic changed from a synonym of legitimate criticism to an illegitimate form of dissent. Different forms of climate skepticism appear in different time periods. Over time an escalation in rhetorical armoury can be shown, which was associated with political events, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the partisan mobilization of science at Congressional hearings.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Two weeks ago a group co-ordinated by The Breakthrough Institute published the Ecomodernist Manifesto (EM). Among its 18 authors there are some who co-authored the Hartwell Paper which advocated a specific approach to climate policy, and which was featured several times here on this blog (yours truly being one of the Hartwell authors). The EM goes beyond climate policy, addressing the broader question of humanity’s place in nature, and history. There is a dedicated website for comments which has some very useful and thoughtful posts.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Mike Hulme explains in The Guardian why "fossil fuel divestment is a misguided tactic". He lists diverse arguments: divestment is not a policy tool; it shifts focus on the 2 degree goal only and thus supports a naive narrative, and climate change is not only about fossil fuels but it is a wicked problem. Finally, there are the killer arguments "this does not work for India" and "this is feel good campaigning". When reading this, I got stuck with the argument of "feel-good campaigning". What exactly is meant by this, and why is it used as a derogatory term?

Mike Hulme once mentions Vattenfall in his article, and this reminded me of an annual campaign here in Hamburg against Vattenfall: "Lesen ohne Atomstrom" - "reading without nuclear energy, the renewable literatur festival". It is a high rank cultural event in its fourth or fifth year. It started as a counter-initiative to a campaign by Vattenfall that once had promoted literary events in Hamburg to improve its public image. Today, "Reading without nuclear energy" is an anti-nuclear, pro renewable energy and climate change campaign with considerable political influence; after a public vote last year, the Hamburg senate had to repurchase the power grid from Vattenfall.

Can you apply here Mike Hulme's arguments? (surprisingly, Vandana Shiva will represent India at this event). In my understanding, Mike Hulme's critique maybe does not fully cover the relevance of such a "feel good" campaign. From an anthropological point of view, this is one of the many ways how climate change and energy issues come to matter in public life. Events like "Lesen ohne Atomstrom" are part of emerging climate change cultures, where science-based knowledge is translated into vernaculars. Here, wicked problems like climate change, energy use, neoliberal politics, regionalization etc. are brought together and are negotiated, and I hesitate to judge this prematurely from a purely distanced science- and expert point of view. What Mike Hulme might disqualify as "purely symbolic" sometimes bears hidden political power. For example, Nina Hagen will recite Bertolt Brecht and thus provide a German "capitalism vs climate" moment that is both place-based and rooted in history.
(slightly changed 22.4.2015).

We are all aware of the dire situation facing earth as we know it in the face of climate change, with dangers lurking in the not too distant years.How do we know?Well, there are outspoken scientists (no names – and there are only a few remaining) who seriously take it upon themselves to warn us.There are well known prominent scientific journals (no names) that publish accounts of the coming doom.And then there is the media and their frequent short horror stories – doomed if you do and doomed if you don’t.

I recently came across a small film, which, if we deconstruct it (all the rage these days) is a wonderful metaphor of what might await us.The film depicts the battle between humans and nature.High stakes, high uncertainty, stakeholder involvement, it is all there – in just over 2 minutes. Nature appears as a continually changing force, a torrent to be reckoned with.Humans appear helpless in its wake.Only a concerted effort diverts disaster.

While the film has nothing to do with climate change, a deconstruction allows us to see the conceptual similarities of what we might face if we continue doing as we do.It is only a very short film but it is necessary to watch it until the bitter but happy end to catch the full metaphor.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

I was recently asked (from someone located in China) ‘to
what extent “postnormal” conditions may acquire significance more in the
democratic West than inauthoritarian
countries.’ History hints that China might have had, and still has, elements of PNS. I conclude that in the end, PNS, in its current configuration, is about power and control, no
matter where one sits and, unfortunately, as a unified concept, PNS resembles Swiss cheese, making it all the more difficult to explicitly determine exactly what it is.

Sustainable use of KLIMAZWIEBEL

The participants of KLIMAZWIEBEL are made of a diverse group of people interested in the climate issue; among them people, who consider the man-made climate change explanation as true, and others, who consider this explanation false. We have scientists and lay people; natural scientists and social scientists. People with different cultural and professional backgrounds. This is a unique resource for a relevant and inspiring discussion. This resource needs sustainable management by everybody. Therefore we ask to pay attention to these rules:

1. We do not want to see insults, ad hominem comments, lengthy tirades, ongoing repetitions, forms of disrespect to opponents. Also lengthy presentation of amateur-theories are not welcomed. When violating these rules, postings will be deleted.2. Please limit your contributions to the issues of the different threads.3. Please give your name or use an alias - comments from "anonymous" should be avoided.4. When you feel yourself provoked, please restrain from ranting; instead try to delay your response for a couple of hours, when your anger has evaporated somewhat.5. If you wan to submit a posting (begin a new thread), send it to either Eduardo Zorita or Hans von Storch - we publish it within short time. But please, only articles related to climate science and climate policy.6. Use whatever language you want. But maybe not a language which is rarely understood in Hamburg.